Tags: Simon Boxall

Disko-very Bob the ARGO float

Simon Boxall and Emily Venables launch the ARGO float

BBC's Quentin Cooper at the launch the ARGO float

“Disko-very Bob” has made it into the West Greenland Current with everything running smoothly – at last! The water column sampling didn’t start well last week (hence lack of my blog) with the failure of the CTD, designed to measure profiles of temperature and salinity to 200m. However what we did see in a test run was that the waters in this part of the ocean show strong inputs of fresh water from the melting glaciers that border the coast.
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Introducing Disko-very Bob

Emily Venables introduces Disko-very Bob, launched this morning from the boat and now the UK’s most northerly ARGO float. Over the next few years this remote unit will measure ocean temperature and salinity as it follows the West Greenland current, beaming back information every 5 days by satellite.

Launching the ARGO float

Launching the ARGO float
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Feist and Simon Boxall on CBC this Friday

Leslie Feist and Dr Simon Boxall feature on the Q Show CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) this Friday 3 October, 10 am (note: Toronto is 5 hours behind UK time). Listen to the podcast on the CBC website.

Measuring ocean conductivity, temperature and density

Oceanographers Simon Boxall and Emily Venables
Oceanographers Simon Boxall and Emily Venables plan the CTD drop, to measure ocean conductivity (salinity), temperature and density.
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Last chance to write on dry land – Part 2

ARGO float launch

We still don’t know if we can expect anything else to be in our container than toothbrushes but we hope to find our ARGO float somewhere in there.

Let me tell you a little more about these fantastic pieces of kit. Observing the ocean is a costly and time consuming business. As our crew will soon find out, dangling a temperature and salinity probe over the side of the boat then hauling it up again takes a while and gives us one single profile of temperature and salinity – a speck in the ocean and a snapshot in time. ARGO floats are like self contained profilers, sinking to whatever depth we tell them to and then travelling along with an ocean current and popping up when we tell them to, transmitting temperature and salinity information back to the ARGOS satellite array, then sinking again for another cycle.
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Launch at the Science Museum

KT Tunstall, David Buckland and Simon Boxall talk at the Science Museum
KT Tunstall, David Buckland and Simon Boxall talk at the Science Museum

KT Tunstall, David Buckland and Simon Boxall photographed during the QA, as part of the launch event at the Science Museum, Tuesday 16 September.